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More Than 200 Republicans in Congress Are Skipping February Town Halls with Constituents
VICE News reports on Feb 16:
Members of Congress are set to return to their districts this weekend for their first weeklong recess since Donald Trump's inauguration. Heading home during legislative breaks is nothing new, but this year most Republicans are foregoing a hallowed recess tradition: holding in-person town halls where lawmakers take questions from constituents in a high school gym, local restaurant, or college classroom.
After outpourings of rage at some early town halls--including crowds at an event near Salt Lake City yelling "Do your job!" at Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee--many Republicans are ducking in-person events altogether. Instead they're opting for more controlled Facebook Live or "tele-town halls," where questions can be screened by press secretaries and followups are limited--as are the chances of becoming the next viral meme of the Left.
For the first two months of the new Congress, the 292 Republicans have scheduled just 88 in-person town hall events--and 35 of those sessions are for Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, according to a tabulation conducted by Legistorm. In the first two months of the previous Congress in 2015, by contrast, Republicans held 222 in-person town hall events.
[...] "What happens in politics is that over time, you can get increasingly insulated from people that have a strongly held point of view that's different [from yours]", [said Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina]. Sessions like tele-town halls aren't a good substitute, he said, because "oftentimes they will screen their calls and those forums can be manipulated".
Republicans who get [verbally] roughed up at their town halls have taken to dismissing the attendees as professional organizers. [...] While there is no evidence of paid protesters attending town halls, it is true that Democratic activists have been organizing to manufacture viral moments of confrontation like the tea party movement did in the summer of 2009.
[...] One strategy for activists has been to host their own town halls and invite their representatives to attend. [...] Another method has been to confront senators and representative in public places and demand they hold a town hall.
Examples throughout the week at AlterNet and The Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @08:10PM
Not only is he NOT **very** Left-Wing, Bernie Sanders is NOT anti-Capitalist at all.
He's not even particularly Liberal in the sense that he has said that he rejects the *gov't* ownership of any of the means of production.
That would appear to include natural monopolies like rail transport and communications networks.
I haven't ever heard of his coming out with any SPECIFICS regarding worker-owned cooperative workplaces e.g. copying Italy's Marcora law [google.com].
What he wants is healthy and well educated USAian wage slaves in order to make USA's existing industrialists competitive.
Bernie Sanders is NOT of the "Left", much less "very".
Only in the USA, where there has been a century-long effort to silence and crush Socialism (the Red Purge; McCarthyism), would someone say Sanders is anything other than Right-Center economically and straddling the Authoritarian/Civil Liberties line on the other axis.
Sanders is a classic Moderate.
Before USAians started trying to redefine words, that was called "A Conservative".
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by jmorris on Saturday February 25 2017, @11:24PM
Nobody would say Bernie is a Socialist.... except Bernie Sanders. He honeymooned in Moscow during the Soviet era, it isn't like he can actually escape the label so he proudly wears it, so you might as well stop the games. Next you can look into the abyss and realize America was not and is not, in anything like its current makeup, going to elect a Socialist. Then realize Bernie also understood this reality. Now you may know the true meaning of despair as the implications of these Truths shatter your world.
You were used, in exactly the same way the Republicans used Conservatives every cycle. We have had enough and thrown over the table, you are still acting like a nice useful idiot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @03:01AM
He honeymooned in Moscow during the Soviet era,
Not really: [politifact.com]
When reached for comment, Sanders’ campaign said that the dates for the trip had already been set, and the couple "set their wedding date to coincide with that trip because they didn't want to take more time off."
In a 2007 interview, Jane Sanders also recalled the peculiar timing: "The day after we got married, we marched in a Memorial Day parade, and then we took off in a plane to start the sister city project with Yaroslavl with 10 other people on my honeymoon."
Bernie Sanders also refers to the trip sarcastically as "quiet and romantic" in his book.
The "honeymoon" was dotted with meetings, interviews and diplomatic functions. A June 2015 profile in The Guardian described the former mayor’s meeting with Yaroslavl city officials:
"After receiving a rundown of central planning, Soviet-style, from Yaroslavl’s mayor, Alexander Riabkov, Sanders notes how the quality of both housing and health care in America appeared to be ‘significantly better’ than in the communist state. ‘However,’ he added, ‘the cost of both services is much, much, higher in the United States.’ "
An education in central planning probably wasn’t the only item on Sanders’ itinerary. Yaroslavl is home to historic churches and buildings, and the Sanderses would have been in for some good sightseeing, said Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Will made it sound as if Sanders was visiting to condone Soviet torture practices, but the Burlington trip was more of a dialogue-building exchange program. The Vermont weekly newspaper Seven Days reported in 2009 that the sister-city relationship "helped local residents who sought to ease tensions between the United States and Soviet Union by initiating citizen-to-citizen exchanges with a Russian city."
Also, the Soviet Union was barely intact at the time of the trip.
you are still acting like a nice useful idiot.
And you are still acting like a nice useful asshole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @03:28AM
America was not and is not, in anything like its current makeup, going to elect a Socialist
Actually, in June 2015, Gallup said that 47 percent of Americans would vote for a socialist president [google.com]
Bernie had made the word popular--even though it didn't actually apply to him.
Meanwhile, in November, Trump got 45.94 percent of the popular vote. [wikipedia.org]
111,850 voted for Bernie even though he'd been blackballed by "his party".
With the 2 populists running head to head, it would have been interesting.
A significant number of folks will tell they didn't so much vote -for- Trump as they voted -against- Hillary.
One also wonders what would have happened with Gary Johnson's 4,489,233 votes and Jill Stein's 1,457,222.
You were used
Not I. Every time I voted, my vote went to the individual I wanted to win that race:
Bernie in the Primary.[1] (In my state, Blues allow you to cross party lines to vote for their guy/gal.) Can't stand the Clintons.
Jill in the General. (The Greens don't allow that crossover stuff in the Primary and I'm registered non-partisan.)
By the summer, Jill pretty much had things sewed up anyway and I really REALLY wanted Clinton to lose.
[1] Bernie went into the convention carrying 22 states IIRC.
The party elite then proceeded to treat him like a bastard stepchild.
Since Hell is fiction and Jews don't believe in that nonsense anyway, cursing Debbie Wasserman Schultz to eternal hellfire just doesn't give any satisfaction.
Maybe something really nasty will happen to her on this plane of existence.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday February 27 2017, @06:59PM
My point is, by USAian standards, Bernie is definitely left-wing (the big thing he favors that makes him left-wing: redistribution of income to poorer people).
But you're definitely right that part of the problem in the US is that you have the supposedly left-wing party a bit to the right of where the right-wing party used to be, while the right-wing party has gone off the deep end into sheer idiocy. And no, I wouldn't be calling the entire party idiots if they weren't cheerfully following a proven idiot who managed to lose half of his daddy's fortune.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.